Posted on 06/18/2004 12:59:32 PM PDT by mrustow
LOL... Good luck though - I've lived in Seattle for over a decade. Ain't no way I'll burn (too waterlogged)...
Even the Devil agrees:
A curious fellow died one day and found himself in limbo waiting in a long, long line for judgment. As he stood there, he noticed that some souls were allowed to march right through the gates of heaven. Others were led over to Satan, who threw them into a lake of fire. Every so often, instead of hurling a poor soul into the fire, Satan would toss him or her to one side.
After watching Satan do this several times, the fellow's curiosity got the better of him. He strolled over and tapped Old Nick on the shoulder.
"Excuse me, there, Your Darkness," he said. "I'm waiting in line for judgment, and I couldn't help wondering why you are tossing some people aside instead of flinging them into the fires of hell with the others?"
"Ah," Satan said with a grin. "Those are from Seattle. They are too wet to burn."
Sorry about that. As an act of contrition, I'm going to throw 40 Hail Marys.
mrustow, graduate of the Samuel Goldwyn School of Theology.
I saw this as a poster on a dorm wall around 1971, so It's been around for a while.
There are some days when you surpass your normal brilliance and ascend to the heights of true genius.
This is one of those days. You made me smile on a day where I was finding little to smile about.
Incoming!
Cool :0)
(and thanks)
[sigh]
I agree.
First they came for the communists and I gave out their names and addresses.
ROTFL...
Interesting. Since the Nazis are widely (erroneously) considered the Right, I guess that necessarily makes anyone opposing them the Left? I don't know Niemoller's history, but was he truly "the Left"?
I'm hoping your irony supplements help here.
You mean there are several "Niemoller's a Bum" stories floating around? I don't plumb the murky depths for stories on the man, but this is the first one I've seen
LOL! Oh, absolutely! I mean, if you're going to do something, do it right.
The fact that many of us have heard it over the decades, with different variations on this or that sentence or who said it, doesn't make it's message any less true.
"Bapstists" are to "Baptists" as "Rollexes" are to "Rolexes".....
The plural of "Rolex" is "Rolices." The plural of "Kleenex" is "Kleenices."
Does that mean that the plural of "Ping" is "Pingices"? ;0)
ping
Yeah? So? I bought my religion from some guy in a back alley in Asia. Wanna make something of it? Huh? Huh? ;0)
It wouldn't happen to have been in the vicinity of one or more of the following posters, would it?
"What if they had a war, and no one came?"
"We're the people your parents warned you about" (A picture depicts a mob of scraggily-looking characters, like something out of Seven Little Monsters.)
"Why?" next to the picture of a GI who had just been shot.
When I was a university student in West Germany during the early 1980s, I saw the above posters on dorm doors all over the place, often translated into clumsy German. The typically America-bashing Gerry students worshiped anything from the American left.
Niemoeller's great moment came when he helped to organize the "Confessing Church" movement which attempted to prevent the Nazis from taking over the German Protestant churches. The specific issue that sparked what was called the Church Struggle was the attempt to apply to the church the so-called Aryan Paragraphs, which banned Jews from the civil service, etc. This meant the dismissal of the (not very numerous) pastors of Jewish origin. The Confessing Church insisted that the church could not accept "integration" (the Nazi word was Gleichschaltung) into the totalitarian state. The Church already had a Lord, and it was not Hitler. That was the issue Niemoeller put his life on the line for. It was right and it took a great deal of guts.
However, neither Niemoeller nor the Confessing Church ever made any statement on behalf of the Jews outside the church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the very few German Protestants who saw clearly the moral enormity of what was at stake.
After the war, Niemoeller and other Confessing Church participants were wracked with guilt over this failure. The Stuttgart Confession was in my view an essentially decent and proper attempt on the part of Confessing Church leaders to lead the German people in coming clean about the persecution of the Jews. I don't share the view that the German people were collectively "Hitler's Willing Executioners" but you really can't say that as a group they were particularly indignant about the mistreatment of their Jewish neighbors.
Many of these church leaders, however, reacted to their guilt by swinging over to an uncritical support of leftist "peace" agitation (some of it Soviet funded). Niemoeller does not, frankly, seem to me to have been the brightest bulb in the chandelier, and he took this path. My sense is that his reasoning went something like: "Before I was too mindlessly patriotic to see the evil clearly, so I will join up with the critics of the postwar west to make sure I never do something like that again." It was a stupid moral strategy, which merely made Niemoeller and others blind to the burning evil of the second half of the twentieth century.
Niemoeller did a tough right thing at great cost at a dark moment in human history, and that can't be taken away. He never saw the big picture clearly before or after the war, and that's part of the record too.
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